


Like green earth gladdened by refreshing rain

by Zdenka



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, IN SPACE!, Reference to non-consensual body modification, Writing rainbow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:20:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21753619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zdenka/pseuds/Zdenka
Summary: Klytaimnestra takes vengeance for her daughter.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 14
Collections: Writing Rainbow Green





	Like green earth gladdened by refreshing rain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Scytale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scytale/gifts).



It is the dead of night in the capital city of Argos when the first beacon sends its signal. At first Klytaimnestra can’t tell what has awakened her; she blinks, groggy with sleep. The receiver by her bed—its circuits concealed among the metal curves of a filigree vase—sounds again, playing a particular melody, the traditional wedding song of Klytaimnestra’s family. It was sung at her wedding; she once hoped to sing it at her daughter’s.

She recognizes the tune, and she is awake instantly, all grogginess vanishing. She sits up, throwing off the covers, and lets the small device play its song into the darkness. She has been awaiting this signal for ten years.

She planted the first beacon herself, before she left Aulis Station. She fitted the parts together hastily in her room, after her daughter’s abbreviated funeral. She took more time with the rest, assembling them in her own workshop back on Argos. Once they were done, she feigned illness for a few days and went out secretly in a two-person shuttle, accompanied only by the cyborg Aigisthos. From one end of the Peloponnesian double-star system to the other she placed her beacons, on icy moon and barren planet and unmanned science station, and finally, the last in orbit around Argos itself. Each of them has only one purpose: to wait unseen and to detect the energy signature of Agamemnon’s flagship, the pattern of its transmitted ID that she knows as well as she knows the lines of her own hand or the schematics of an AI’s mechanical brain.

The second beacon transmits its signal as she finishes fastening her gown, formal dress for the heroes’ return. She presses the button that will send a call to Aigisthos’s room and let him know she is requesting his presence. The third and the fourth beacon light up the receiver in quick succession, as she is combing her hair.

Just after the fifth beacon sounds, there is a quiet chime at the door. The automated voice of the palace AI speaks: “Mistress, Aigisthos the cyborg seeks entry.”

“Let him enter.” The door slides open and she can see Aigisthos in her mirror, his silvery metal face impassive as always. People glance at him and see only an expressionless servant with no will of his own. Yet Clytemnestra has learned to read his emotions in the set of his shoulders or the tilt of his head.

Being made into a cyborg servant is reserved for those convicted of certain severe crimes, after impartial trial and sentencing—or so the law says. This was done to Aigisthos as a child. His small body was cut apart, his flesh melded with metal and wire, made strong to serve, and with programming in his computer-brain that forces him to obey. Agamemnon’s father Atreus gave the order, disposing of the last living scion of a rival branch of his family. What could be a greater triumph than to make your enemy’s child bow to you as a helpless servant?

Klytaimnestra felt sick when she learned of it. And then she thought that perhaps his desire for justice would be the same as her own. When she returned from Aulis, she asked Aigisthos if he would trust her, and he willingly put himself in her hands. Klytaimnestra has been intimate with his metal innards, opening him up and weaving his programming anew. She could have left his loyalty programming intact, only changing the focus to herself. Instead, she kept her word and gave him back his own will. Aigisthos walks the halls of Argos, in all appearances the same obedient servant. But his mind and his will are his own.

If anyone knew, they would be horrified at the thought of a modified cyborg who is free to act on his own. Surely, they would say, he would turn on his masters. He has not betrayed Klytaimnestra. But for her sake, he will betray Agamemnon, and he will speak no word of what they have planned together.

“Come here,” she says, setting down her comb. “Help me do my hair.”

Aigisthos hesitates. “Would not one of your maids be better?” He still shrinks back from touching others with his metal fingers, though she tells him often that she does not mind.

“Your hands are as deft as theirs.”

He comes over and helps her set the jewelled pins in her hair. She looks in the mirror and sees the pins glint green, red, blue as she turns her head back and forth. It makes her thinks of space battles as they are projected on a screen for human eyes, the swift beams of lasers and the explosions of torpedoes scattering light with each hit.

Klytaimnestra smooths down her skirts. She is ready, a fit match for Agamemnon in the gold braid of his formal uniform. There is only one more thing to prepare. She enters a code to open a certain safe, another to release the forcefield around what it holds.

Klytaimnestra began creating it in her workshop when she returned from Aulis Station, still with the cold hollow feeling inside her that came with the absence of her eldest daughter. She was not even by Iphigeneia’s side throughout it all; Agamemnon sent junior officers to put her off with one lie after another, finally telling her that Iphigeneia had gone to bed so Klytaimnestra wouldn’t look for her until the morning.

Perhaps he even thought he was sparing Klytaimnestra by keeping her from the sight of their daughter’s suffering. In vain, if so; Klytaimnestra made the station computer show her the recordings later.

The station’s records clearly showed the panic of the fleet commanders and officers gathered at Aulis Station when the wormhole that was the reason for the station being built there, the one that was the next jump on the route to the Troad system, collapsed unexpectedly. There was fear, anger, accusations of treachery, demands to abandon the mission—if the Trojans could destroy a wormhole, what other deadly weapons might they have in store?

Agamemnon insisted stoutly that it was a natural phenomenon—as far as Klytaimnestra knows, the truth has never been ascertained either way—and that a new route could be found.

Kalkhas, the fleet’s chief engineer, suggested the method. Neither a computer searching alone nor a human searching alone could find a new wormhole route in time. But once there had been a way; the first settlers of the Argos system genetically modified themselves and their descendants to link in rapport with their machines, until they were practically cyborgs themselves.

“Send for Iphigeneia,” an officer said on the recording, and Klytaimnestra watching clenched her fists until her nails dug into her palms. Iphigeneia, trained by Klytaimnestra herself; bright and skilled and trusting, eager to help her father in any way she could.

The scene skipped ahead. Agamemnon had his hand on Iphigeneia’s shoulder, speaking to her earnestly. She nodded and sat down in the chair, fastened the straps with quick hands. Kalkhas spoke the traditional prayers, invoking Hermes guide of travellers and Athena the Weaver, whose grace sends ships through a wormhole from one end of the galaxy to another as swiftly as a weaver’s shuttle flies through the warp and weft of a loom. Then Kalkhas pulled the silvery network of wires over her head and fastened them in place, linking Iphigeneia in rapport with the station computer.

For eight hours they kept her searching, while her face twisted and her hands shook, while her lips formed fragments of unintelligible words. She found the wormhole route they needed, and Iphigeneia’s own father cared not how the search burned through her fragile organic brain. When they finally took her out of the harness, she slid in a heap to the floor, her eyes rolling back in her head. She did not speak again or regain true consciousness until she died in the station’s sickbay a few hours later. And Klytaimnestra was not told, was not allowed to be with her daughter when she died.

Her fury transmuted into cold anger, Klytaimnestra sought her workshop, twisted wires together and shaped metal until the shape of what she wanted to make became clear in her mind. She has had time to refine it, over the years while Agamemnon and his fleet fought in orbit around Troy. She has had ample time to prepare.

Klytaimnestra is waiting on the palace steps when Agamemnon steps out of his shuttle. War has aged him; a touch of grey in his beard and at his temples. He still stands straight as a soldier, she notices detachedly, and he wears the uniform well, the eagle of the Argive fleet sparkling in bronze on his chest.

She has set out the red carpet for him, a crimson weave that extends up the steps and all the way through the palace into his own private chambers.

Klytaimnestra makes a carefully prepared speech in fulsome praise of Agamemnon and the army’s courage and achievements in war. Agamemnon listens with barely concealed impatience. When she is done he makes his own speech, much briefer.

“People of Argos, Troy has fallen to our fleet. We have taken the planet’s people and its resources to serve us. Our fleet has bombed the surface, and left its cities in ash and fire, still-smoking ruins. No one will live there for centuries. Let all know the price to be paid for treachery.”

“I hear your words with gladness, my lord and husband. Now let me give you the welcome I have prepared.”

At Klytaimnestra’s nod, Aigisthos bends down and touches his metal fingers to the fibers of the carpet, activating its program. The cloth moves into motion, weaving and unweaving swift patterns to welcome Agamemnon. Bronze eagles, starships soaring through the void, ceremonial spears and helmets; wreaths of laurel for victory, garlands of wheat and poppies for Demeter and her daughter Kore, the thunderbolt of Zeus, the scales of justice.

Agamemnon frowns. “What is this?”

“The weaving your faithful wife has done in your absence, while keeping your house and your planet safe. I set it out to welcome you home.”

“It’s too much,” he says sharply. “An engineer’s skill shouldn’t be used for trifles like this. How decadent would I seem if I used our highest technology to tread upon and trample it underfoot? What would the army say, what would the people say?”

“Let them speak as they wish,” Klytaimnestra says soothingly. “An occasion like this comes along once in a lifetime. I wove this pattern specially for your homecoming.”

Agamemnon still frowns, but he sets his foot on the programed path. Patterns form and reform under his feet as he walks unto the palace. Klytaimnestra walks at his side. Aigisthos is behind them, his metal face humbly lowered. He is a servant, programmed to obey; no one gives him a second glance.

Agamemnon enters the palace, and the blood-red carpet bends faithfully under his feet. When he reaches his chambers, he allows Klytaimnestra to help him out of his uniform, to take his sidearm and his ceremonial dagger and put them aside. He sinks into the bath with a sigh.

And the blood-red carpets split apart into a myriad of ropes like twisting snakes, wrapping his limbs and holding him down. Agamemnon barely has time to shout before he is dragged under the water.

Klytaimnestra could let him drown, but she is not so patient. She takes up her own gun and shoots him twice in the head.

There is some writhing and bubbling, which Klytaimnestra watches without a change of expression. After a short time, the water is still, with trails of blood twining through it like crimson threads. Klytaimnestra kneels down beside the bath and splashes her face with the red droplets. She laughs, though her laughter is half a sob. At last, after so many years, it is done.

Aigisthos comes to her side. “What will you do now?” he asks quietly.

Klytaimnestra feels her mouth stretch in a smile. “Agamemnon has been away for a long time,” she says. “He is not so essential to the planet’s governance as he believed. And the people of Argos are used to obeying me.” She accepts the hand he offers her and stands up. “I never meant to conceal what I have done. Agamemnon has met justice.”

“I am with you,” Aigisthos says simply. “You know that.”

She does. She glances down at their joined hands, metal woven with flesh. “You and I will rule in Argos,” she says. “If the people want to be ruled by the House of Atreus, let them have you.”

Aigisthos hesitates. “But I am—” He gestures down at his half-metal body.

“The first settlers of Argos chose to modify themselves, to make no distinction between themselves and their machines, or those who bridged the two kinds. It can be so again.” She raises her head. “Between the two of us, we will set things in good order.”

Aigisthos’s face cannot smile, but she can tell by the tilt of his head that he would if he could. He releases her hand and reaches out gently with metal fingers to trace the droplets of blood on her face, drawing it into fanciful patterns, flowers and growing vines. She takes his hand again, and they go out to face the people.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is loosely based on the version of the story in Aeschylus’s tragedy _Agamemnon_. The title is adapted from a wonderfully ghoulish line Klytaimnestra speaks in that play, rejoicing over her successful murder of Agamemnon:
> 
> "Fallen thus, he gasped away his life, and as he breathed forth quick spurts of blood, he struck me with dark drops of gory dew; while I rejoiced no less than the sown earth is gladdened in heaven's refreshing rain at the birthtime of the flower buds." (translation by Herbert Weir Smyth)


End file.
